Saturday, October 07, 2017

The anti-Second Amendment folks have a script that they all read from, and the line at the top is:

"Nobody is trying to take your guns away"

There's this thing about undermining the constitution; it's hard to do when you openly state "We Don't Think You Deserve These Rights Because We Don't Trust You", so these folks say other things, like :

"Gee, I know YOU wouldn't abuse this gun, but obviously other people will, so let's just agree that it's A Good Idea to make it illegal for anybody to own it".

Like most people, I didn't know what a Bump Stock was until the Vegas shooting. If I had heard of it, I would have shrugged my shoulder and thought "what a dorky idea".

Here's what it looks like:

Now we have politicians lining up to claim that they're against it ... whatever it is. Well, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But a gun stock is not a firearm, and it is not protected by the Constitution. So they can make a lot of noise and a lot of headlines and won't have to worry about the Constitutional Rights of their constituents. What a great day to be a Politician in front of a microphone! Hell, if they had scruples, they would have retired from Congress.

I think that the immediate reactions to Vegas are beginning to get a bit too strident. And I wonder whether, in all the confusion, the anti-gun folks are going to take the ball and run with it until they make it illegal to own anything that isn't "specifically permitted" by currently existing law.

There's this 'guideline' that the BATF uses: "Any Sporting Purpose", which supposedly means something. But when people decide that they are the best arbiters of what is a "sporting purpose", that line shifts in a direction which does not benefit law-abiding people whose definition of a "sport" differs from the Lowest Common Denominator.

For example, when I was 16 I spent an entire summer working in the fields so I could buy a Valmet Competition Rifle. I was getting into Gallery Rifle competition, and I ended up with that $600 single-shot .22 caliber rifle, and an 18- power Unertl telescope. I managed to win some matches and advanced to "EXPERT" class, because I had equipment which allowed me to take the best advantage of my skills.That rifle would be illegal today, in some aspects, because it had a "Thumb-hole Stock". You will now find that 'feature' to be one of those which, in combination with other similarly benign features, would define the rifle as an "Assault Rifle".

Was there a legitimate sporting use for that feature? Yes, but it would not be obvious to a lot of the knuckleheads today who are madly writing articles saying there is "No Sporting Purpose" for certain features which are intrinsically no more intimidating than competition. (There's now a movement to change "any sporting purpose" to "any legal usage" or similar language, to reduce the controversy.)